“Why aren’t we doing this?”

Today I gave a presentation on Key Online Influencers (KOI) to my reverse mentoring group and one comment I got was “why on earth aren’t we doing this?!”. Great question. While many other industries have embraced the age of the online influencer pharma has not. Now we all know that pharma has been very late to game in terms of social, driven my multiple misconceptions, most of which revolve around a “we can’t do that” attitude or perspective, but we are also an industry used to working with “influencers” so why is the concept of online influencers so difficult?
I am old enough to remember to industry pre-digital, and unlike some other industries, pharma actually embraced the concept of influencers, in the guise of KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). There are process and job functions dedicated to working with KOLs and yet when it comes to digital many run out of the room screaming (not literally I hasten to add). It seems to be linked to this lingering fear of social media, and the lack of perceived control that this channel has brought. Yet we have the process already in place that just need minor tweaks to cope with the online realm so why are we not doing more with Online Influencers?
I firmly believe the answer to this lies in a lack of understanding and the fears that many senior people still associate with social media. Counter this with the digital natives we now have working in pharma who may not fully understand the reticence to use the channel but are not yet in a position to champion it or to challenge the status quo (unless they are reverse mentors!).
What we need is for our senior leaders to embrace what has become one of the main communication channels of our age. We need those leaders to step up and help us bridge our old KOL process to a modern online friendly process. We need those leaders to question their teams as to “why on earth aren’t we doing this”. The only way they will be able to do that however is through education and actually starting to understand this channel, and understand that it brings us value and is not to be feared but rather embraced.
I am very fortunate that I have been able to build up a reverse mentoring programme for my client and am starting to see some of this change happening. It is immensely rewarding to start seeing senior leaders say things like “why on earth aren’t we doing this” when I talk about online influencers. It is also so rewarding to see the change that this programme is driving. After years of helping drive change in pharma companies this has to be one of the most personally rewarding initiatives I have been involved with. When I set up the programme I would have been happy to see one or two senior leaders using social – but now I a seeing many more signing up, and also embracing other new technologies such as AI and Blockchain. Maybe soon the question will be “why on earth didn’t we do this sooner”…